Lorain City Schools reassessing its 'Success for All' reading program

LORAIN -- Lorain City Schools is reevaluating its "Success For All" reading program and could switch to a new system by next year.

The SFA program has been in place since 2007 when it was established by former superintendent Cheryl Atkinson.

The SFA program is essentially a licensed curriculum for reading education.

The decision to review the program is not out of the ordinary, Superintendent Tom Tucker said.

"We're doing what every school district does, we're taking a look at new reading programs," Tucker said.

The district will have its teachers preview the five or six other reading programs and fill out a survey over the next few weeks, Tucker said. The survey will then be used to make a decision, he said.

This is the first time the program has been evaluated since implementation, Tucker said.

"Our scores have not really got substantially better," he said.

In the 2011-2012 school year, Lorain City Schools only met one state indicator for academic success.

While the district fell just short of the state's reading requirements in the 10th and 11th grades, only 52 percent of the district's fifth-grade students were at or above the proficient level for reading. On average, there was a roughly 15 percent gap in proficiency between students in grades three to eight and the state requirement of 75 percent.

The low ranking, combined with previous years' scores, landed the district under the control of an state academic distress commission.

The reading coaches and administrators in charge of the SFA program are paid through Title 1 grant funding. Those positions would likely be shifted to a new program, Tucker said.

The actual reading program is paid for through local funds, but staff members and some of the materials for the program are paid through Title 1, he said.

"No matter what program you use, those teachers are available," he said.

When SFA was started, the administrators' salaries were paid 20 percent from the general fund and 80 percent from Title 1. It has since changed to 100 percent grant funded, he said. An exact cost for licensing SFA was unavailable yesterday.

Atkinson -- who brought SFA to Lorain and to DeKalb County Schools afterwards -- joined the Baltimore-based nonprofit after leaving DeKalb halfway through her three-year contract, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She serves as Success For All Foundation's director of district relations and travels the country promoting it, the Journal-Constitution reported.